Is Grass-Fed Beef Really Healthier?

No

Wed, 2013-12-04 06:00

As a rebuttal to an article and documentary that slams conventionally raised beef, here are the facts on beef and the environment and nutrition.

Bashing conventionally raised beef in lieu of organic or grass-fed beef isn’t new. I have nothing against any of the production methods that are out there. I’ve long said what makes America great is the abundance of food choices we have when we walk into a grocery store.

I do get frustrated, however, when one segment of the beef industry slams another in order to sell its product. I believe each steak can stand on its own merit, no matter how it was raised. This statement might raise a few eyebrows from some of you, but that is my stance as I preface the article I’m about to comment on today.

A documentary entitled, “American Meat -- An Inside Look At Sustainable Farming In America,” was recently released, and Joseph Mercola, an osteopathic physician, best-selling author and alternative medicine proponent, is promoting the documentary on his website. Mercola is respected in many circles, particularly by the paleo crowd, for his commonsense nutrition advice. He stands firmly behind animal fats and proteins as a solid basis of any healthy diet regimen, which I appreciate and agree with wholeheartedly. However, his protein recommendations come with one caveat -- it must be grass-fed beef.

Mercola writes, “If you put good old-fashioned organically raised, pasture-fed and finished meat in a nutrition analyzer, you’d find it’s one of the most nutritious foods you can eat. However, many are still in the dark about the vast differences between Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) and organically raised, grass-fed meats, in terms of nutrient content and contamination with veterinary drugs, antibiotics, genetically modified organisms, and disease-causing pathogens. Differences in the animals’ diets and living conditions create vastly different end products. For example, most CAFO cows are fed grains (oftentimes genetically engineered grains, which make matters even worse), when their natural diet consists of plain grass.

“If you’re under the age of 40 or so, and have never spent time on a real farm, chances are you have a rather dim concept of just how different today’s food production is from traditional, time-tested farming practices. These differences have monumental ramifications for our environment, for the health and wellbeing of the animals being raised, and for your own health.”

This fear-mongering comes without any substantial evidence of the claims, and for those of us who have seen beef raised in pastures and in a feedlot, I don’t see the dark and treacherous dangers he describes in his article.

My rebuttal to Mercola and this “American Meat” documentary is two-fold.

First, let me address the nutrition side:

According to Meat Myth Crushers, “Grass-fed beef has slightly lower levels of saturated fat than corn-fed beef. While grass-fed beef does have slightly higher levels of omega-3 fatty acids than cattle finished on corn and grain, neither type of beef is a rich source of omega 3s compared to fish. Salmon, for example, contains 35 times more omega 3s than beef. Whether these differences translate to a truly meaningful health benefit in the context of a varied diet has not been established. “Interestingly, new research from Texas A&M University found that men who consumed corn-fed beef improved their cholesterol levels, while men who consumed grass-fed beef experienced no change.”

According to Jude Capper, if the entire U.S. beef industry was converted to grass-finished beef, we would need an additional 131 million acres of land, and 468 billion gals. of water to produce 26.1 billion lbs. of beef, which would generate an additional 135 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions. Think of the extra resources that such a production scheme would entail to feed the estimated 9 billion people projected as the world population for the year 2050.

Additionally, all beef is grass-fed, but some is grain-finished. Yet, cattle still spend the majority of their lives on grass.